RELATED RESEARCH PROJECTS

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner a received an Faculty Fellowship and seed funding for her project, “Predictive Modeling for Impact Assessment,” from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Diesner collaborates closely with NCSA scientists on the project, which builds on her work developing computational solutions to assess the impact of issue-focused information projects such as social justice documentaries and books. Her research team leverages big social data for this purpose and combines techniques from machine learning and natural language processing to identify a fine-grained set of impact factors from textual data sources such as news articles, reviews, and social media. This project aims to locate...

How can we use user-generated content to construct, infer or refine network data? We have been tackling this problem by leveraging communication content produced and disseminated in social networks to enhance graph data. For example, we have used domain-adjusted sentiment analysis to label graphs with valence values in order to enable triadic balance assessment. The resulting method enables fast and systematic sign detection, eliminates the need for surveys or manual link labeling, and reduces issues with leveraging user-generated (meta)-data.

The Center for Children’s Books will host the 2016 Gryphon Lecture on Friday, March 11. The annual lecture, which is free and open to campus and the public, features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture.

Denise Agosto, GSLIS research fellow and professor in Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics, will deliver this year’s lecture, "The True Story of Teens, Social Media, and Libraries: Using Teen-Centered Research to Break Down Pervasive Stereotypes.” Agosto’s research interests include youth information behaviors, public libraries, multicultural issues in youth library services, and qualitative research methods. She...

Several GSLIS affiliates presented this week at HASTAC 2015, the annual conference of the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. Held at Michigan State University May 28-29, HASTAC 2015 featured presentations relating to the theme, "Art and Science of Digital Humanities."

From the abstract: This workshop is intended for a broad audience ranging from curious graduate students exploring digital humanities to the experienced text mining researcher. The workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the HathiTrust Digital Libraru collection and its...

Professor Michael Twidale and doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa spoke on May 14 at the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Information Seeking hosted by the Center for Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University. The workshop brought together multidisciplinary scholars, including innovators in social and collaborative information seeking, with the goal of defining research challenges in the field.

Abstract: As computational and informational resources become ever more abundant, we see changes in the way people learn how to use them, adopt, adapt, appropriate, tinker, tailor, combine. and modify them. Examples include software developers who search as they code, and data scientists going online to get ideas for how best to clean,...